Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers is an American entrepreneur best known for being the founder and former president of CD Baby, an online CD store for independent musicians. A professional musiciansince 1987, Sivers started CD Baby by accident in 1997 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby went on to become the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth22 September 1969
CountryUnited States of America
Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you'll do well.
Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.
If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in.
If I’m not saying ‘Hell Yeah!’ to something, then I say no.
When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.
The purpose of money is to trade for things that make you happy. So if you can bypass money and get directly to the happy, you've saved a lot of trouble. And it makes others happier, too, when you organize your business around non-monetary things.
When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws.
The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task at hand covers both bases, but not often.
Every time you're making a choice, one choice is the safe/comfortable choice - and one choice is the risky/uncomfortable choice. the risky/uncomfortable choice is the one that will teach you the most and make you grow the most, so that's the one you should choose.
Learning. It's really the primary reason behind everything I do. Programming, entrepreneuring, writing.
The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. … The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.
I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn't even know we had and realize that the opposite may also be true.
Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait - put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.
Instead of staying strong and working through when times are really tough, I usually quit this recipe for failure and start a whole new recipe. So if something is too challenging, I tend to chalk it up as not a good fit, and move on to something else.